The Winter Followed Me
by Nilly's Issue
Summary: When it ends, they hunker down in a motel room. This isn't to say that anything ends. (Steve and Natasha in the aftermath of the Winter Soldier.)


When it ends, they hunker down in a motel. This isn't to say that it ended. She knows there's no such thing. Every event has strings. Memories don't flat line. The sound itself leaves a ringing in the ears of those who hear it. There are a series of impacts that hit with fluctuating force as time passes. They leave behind so many strings, and the weight of them drags in Natasha's stomach. Strings threading between buildings and ghosts, weaving through her ribs, constricting. So many strings, and at the moment they are both tied to the floor.

Steve is flagging.

Everything she's learned in the past two weeks has shifted her perspective on how she defines him. Her frame of reference has grown considerably. Her frame of reference is defined by blood, sweat, and Steve shaking, trembling with a gun in his hand that kills Yakov.

"_Bucky," Steve pleads. "Bucky, please." His voice cracks with emotion. Yakov's hand tightens around her throat, digs his thumbs into her jugular, gagging, choking. _

Steve had fallen asleep in the car. He steadily drooped as they drove, but at first he'd been almost responsive. Almost responsive meaning he stared sightlessly at the dash, blood splattered over his face. Streaks of dirt smeared his pale complexion. She wanted to hate him, wanted to crush his fragile countenance, drag her fingernails down his chest and leave deep, life-ending gashes there. She shook with it while Steve's head rocked forward once, twice, and finally settled against the headrest, vulnerable throat bared.

The urge remains when she parks the car. The brakes let out a soft squeal as she glides to a slow, imperceptible stop. Steve doesn't even move. She gets out, leaving her door propped open, and pays for the room. When she opens the passenger side, he sags forward and blinks awake.

"I booked a room," she whispers. Her gaze flickers to the backseat, expecting to see Sam, but he isn't there. She doesn't know where he went, only that he had quietly promised to be back soon. Everyone has wounds to lick.

Steve mumbles something and rubs his eyes with his sleeve. Natasha presses her hand to the underside of his bicep, guiding him upwards. Steve grips the doorway and lurches up. She almost hears his bones creak in protest. Shoulders stooped, face battered, and muscles quaking, every trace of Steve Rogers feels crumbled into dust.

She wants to be the one who does so, squeeze him in her hands and feel the cracks splinter across his body before he falls apart.

Natasha grabs their bags from the trunk, and Steve looks at her with blurry awareness before he turns around and ambles towards the motel. He walks like something shattered.

_Air is starts to whistle through her abused throat. She wheezes, can't breath, she can't breathe. Steve's gun shakes and he's crying and Yakov's lips press against her head._

Steve stands stranded in the middle of the room, his back to her, leather jacket virtually shredded. She drops their bags in front of the twin bed on the left, swinging the car keys on her finger. Natasha isn't anxious. She doesn't twitch aimlessly, nor does she squirm like a rat trapped underfoot. She feels like one.

"I'll shower first, and then we can sort you out, okay?"

The words linger in the air, and Steve nods, exhales in reply. She hasn't found the courage to look at his eyes yet.

"Your head's still okay, right?" he asks.

Natasha's hand drifts to her throat. It's not her head that she has to worry about. Bruises will start to rise soon. Fingerprints. Terrible, temporary scars of choking, of death, of his unbreakable grip, when he used to press her against a wall and kiss her, and now the strength is used to kill her. The swelling sensation blooms in her stomach, feels like a sudden tightness in her body. Everything strangled and running out of air.

_Natasha lets out a sobbing breath when he lets go, slides down her back with his eyes wide open. She can't breath, but she turns to Steve and rasps, "No, no, Steve." Betrayed. She falls to her knees and grips Yakov's face. "No." Shuts his eyelids. Cries. _

"It's alright," she says.

The water pounds into her sore back muscles with a reassuring force that is impressive for how old the system must be. Pink droplets run from her hair. Natasha is a stream of blood. Red in the ledger and red in the pores.

She dries herself off, dresses in sweats and a gray flannel that must be Steve's. It smells like him, and something about how it bares her collar seems right. If she can show him her bones maybe he can believe her.

Maybe she can be the Wolf and lunge for him at the very end, simply for the reason that he is too small for this world. Lunge for him and make his blood spray from his jugular.

Steve sat down while she was showering, but that looks like the only movement he's made. All his clothes are still on. He's still covered in blood. He's still pale and dirt-streaked. Natasha throws the bag filled with medical on the bed opposite Steve and sits down across from him. Their knees knock together when she settles.

"I had to."

Natasha swallows, wraps her knuckles in his jacket. "We need to get you out of these."

This is something to focus on. Natasha glides her fingertips up to his nape, eases the coat down his shoulders, and bends his elbows out of each sleeve. The maroon button-up comes off more slowly, and the damage unveils itself like a grotesque art show when she slides it away from his body. A white undershirt is his last layer, and it clings to him like second skin with blood, sweat, and whatever dust he collected from the warehouse. She debates cutting the hem but settles for tearing the shirt down the middle. She expects the condition she sees, and she's not a stranger to injury, but the bruises and deep, weeping gashes on his torso undercut her.

She stands, tosses the shirt in the trash, and goes to the bathroom to run a towel under the faucet. Inspecting his back when she returns prompts a sympathetic wince. The long slabs of muscle are clouded with blue and black bruises. Several grapefruit-sized welts are still a bright red.

Natasha sits on the bed next to him and twists to rest the hot towel on his lower back. He jumps with the initial contact, but he makes an audible groan once he sinks into the heat. She works it up his back, wiping away grime and the sensation of Bucky's hands throwing him into the cement.

_Bucky. "Bucky and I were brothers once," Steve had said before it all. Natasha wants to remind him that everyone he knows is his once. They're all dead, and just last week she had watched him lay in bed all day and stare at a framed photo of Peggy Carter. Instead Natasha readjusts the strap on his shoulder; it looks too loose to be safe._

After she cleans the back of his arms so he can lay down, she stifles the urge to press her hand into his bruising, watch him squirm beneath her unrelenting pressure.

"You can lay down now," she says, returning to her place opposite him.

"I had to kill him."

Her stomach churns. They need to eat, too. She wants to hate him so badly that nausea wells up in her throat, threatens to rise and make her vomit, throw up everything she's ever felt today and last week and Steve, streaked with tears and shaking, _fucking shaking_ hands.

Those same hands land on her face.

Steve's thumbs press against her cheekbones, a tough so light it can barely be felt. His fingertips are four pressure points framing the front of her skull. When she finally looks at him, forces herself to examine the features she's been intertwined with, suffered beside, for the past two weeks.

Steve is wrecked. His features are creased with utter devastation. Bloodshot blue eyes are filled with tears, split lips wobble together, bare shoulders shiver with pent-up breaths. He looks at her, and she wants to die under his gaze, bring him with her. "I _had to _kill him," he says. "He was killing you. I had to-," and the words get choked in his throat. When his eyelids squeeze shut, tears fall and get caught in the scratches, mix with blood on their way down to his jaw. Steve shudders, tangles his fingers in her wet hair, and Natasha lets him press their foreheads together.

"I had to," Steve pleads, voice hitched with guilt and pain.

Natasha feels the built up tension in her arms release, like a great tidal wave of _unknowing_ washing down her body. She lifts her head, feels her mouth knock against Steve's forehead as she wraps her arms around his neck, tucks him into her shoulder. The seams along her chest start to pop, heaving, wet sobs leaking to her ribs. The pain coats her face, and Natasha hides her eyes in his hair.

"I know," she says.

Steve shudders beneath her, and it rattles her bones with him.

Natasha knows that she's equipped to lose, that she's built on a foundation of detachment to loss. She has never had much, and she learned to let it go when she did. She and Yakov were lovers. He was her first love, a twisted notion of the thing. She remembers the way he touched her, the flashes that passed his eyes when she said certain things, mentioned the foreign battleground of America. Bucky was never out of reach to Natasha. But Yakov wasn't Steve's best friend. This shatters Steve because he has an intimate relationship with loss. It happens quickly, a dropkick to his heart. He had so much and then he had nothing. Bucky was Steve's for over twenty years, and the acceptance of that cuts her. Twenty years Steve laughed and Bucky Barnes laughed back; she had Yakov for two years, three months on the run before they caught them.

It hits her, and she digs her fingers into Steve's hair even harder.

Minutes pass with the clock on the wall ticking like a metronome.

There comes startling realness in touching someone. She remembers when she was first taken in by SHIELD, how she flinched from touch. She had circled Clint like prey, waiting for him to make his advance. She was to seduce him; that was the mission.

He held her hand instead.

In the dim yellow light of the motel room, Natasha releases her grip on Steve. She graces her hands across his shoulders, down his arms, around his ribs as she pushes him to lay down. Contact.

"Close your eyes."

She runs a wet cloth under each of his eyes, erasing tears and dirt. Gently wipes away the blood clinging to his lashes. Listens to his breath slow, slow, and softer. Warm air weaves between her fingers when she smooths the red from his lips. Smiles to herself when she imagines Steve's first kiss. Sobers.

"_Peggy said my last name a lot," Steve says in the dark of the room. "Said she liked the sound of it." Natasha listens to him exhale. "I didn't realize what that meant until now." _

Sitting over Steve's bare torso, staring at the fragile state of his skin, feels like the kind of intimacy that people run from. This penetrates her soul more than sex does, more than most things. Stabs her right in the chest. Natasha lets that unravel in her veins, slither through her bloodstream, and returns to cleaning the wreckage before her.

It takes well over five minutes just to bathe the dirt, cement dust, and plaster layered over him. The wounds look better and worse uncovered. It's useless to stitch anything, so she pads the still-bleeding gashes with gauze, worriedly feels two of his ribs shift under her touch, and settles ice over the welt that developed over the broken bones. Steve had mentioned earlier that the serum takes care of a majority of his injuries without intervention. He hasn't said anything yet, and she knows he's not one for masochism. If he couldn't be healed on his own, then he would tell her, she thinks.

"You should really take your jeans off," she says, eying the holes and caked dirt.

Steve doesn't even move. "Not tonight, I'm tired."

"You're not funny, you know," she replies dryly. Because she's not in the mood for this, Natasha unbuttons, unzips, and pulls his pants at the ankles. Instead of yelping like she expects, he groans and wriggles, allowing her to slip them off his hips with one smooth movement. They're garbage now, so she tosses them next to the canister by the door.

The levity drains from the room while Natasha stands there, perched between the two beds. She doesn't know what happened, only that she feels like she bumped into a brick wall after forgetting it was there in the first place. Yakov is dead. Bucky is dead. SHIELD is something she can't process yet. Now it's Steve and Natasha in a worn-out hotel room.

Steve's eyes flutter open, dark and exhausted.

"Lay down, Natasha," he says. His voice is hoarse and crackled, rolling around her ears like something soothing.

She sits, feels her heart skip like a shorted record player, and then lies down. She carefully lays her head on the joint of his arm and shoulder, curls her fingers into the hand Steve has resting on his stomach. Technically she and Steve are homeless now, orphans brought to a standstill, but that falls by the wayside. Currently, she closes her eyes into his skin, lets the fissures in her ribcage spread like a spiderweb and bleed all over. It's a wet, aching pain, almost as reassuring as Steve's shuttered breaths. In her mind she sees them as one injury, the same sucking chest wound and the same struggle to breath around it.

Steve will tremble with the urge to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, until he falls asleep. Natasha will lie awake, experiencing the chaos occurring in her body like a tidal wave with a rise and a fall, once more.

Later in the night, when Steve's lax and warm and unconscious, her phone will ring, and she'll have to peel herself from his side to answer it. Tony Stark will say,_ "So I heard about SHIELD." _

Natasha will be exhausted, more so in her bones than her brain, so she'll just say, "Yeah."

"_Come here. I have room,"_ he'll say, quietly and passionately, and Natasha will know that Tony knows exactly who the Winter Soldier was, to both of them.

Natasha will say, "Okay."

Later Natasha will melt into Steve's side again, and Sam will sink into the other bed with a hand on her ankle. Small, Natasha will turn her face into Steve and whisper brokenly, "This week was rough, Sam."

And Sam will say, "The next one will be better."

Later, it will be tomorrow.

* * *

**First of all, this is for the lovely vickydetos, who prompted me two absolutely brilliant ideas. **

**Now about the story. It was inspired by the fact that a) can we talk about the fact that the trailer, while awesome, was super happy considering the fact that Steve is fighting the best friend he thought he dropped off a train who is now sent to kill him and Natasha is fighting her former probably-lover and b) I don't foresee an ending for the movie that isn't Bucky dying. I really don't. **

**I'm aware that Natasha's characterization is probably off, but I don't think she's quite the robot I've accidentally portrayed her as, and in writing her I'm trying to work out the kinks. Eventually I have to hit the right note, you know? **

**I tucked this one in the Avengers category because Natasha isn't a character in the Captain America category yet, and essentially this story is set in the Avengers universe. If you want to punch me for it, avoid the teeth.**

**Yes, "this condition is neurotic" is still in the works. **

**Let me know what you think, lovelies :)**

The title is taken from the song "Magnet" by Now, Now.


End file.
